Eric Schmidt says Great Firewall of China will Fall

Now, I’m sure that many of you may have heard of the Great Firewall of China. This is basically an attempt by the Chinese government to censor everything that comes through internet to their people. In other words, it’s an attempt to control something as big as the internet. I agree with this guy. There is no way that country can control the content that comes through something as big as this. This internet was meant to be free and for all people to do what they wanted with it. I don’t think anyone can control it. It’s too big and there are too many people who can do anything on it. The tighter these people try and squeeze, the harder it will be for them. I also agree with what he says – and that is that censorship, in any way, will fail.

Now that doesn’t mean that I want there to be public beheadings posted on the front page of news sites, but the market is what will decide that. If something is deemed to violent or too obscene, the people will say so. This is called freedom and the free market – and it’s something that a lot of people don’t want us to have.

You may have remembered reading something a few months ago about how the internet is coming under increasing fire by governments all over the world. I don’t agree with a lot of what is on the internet – this is true. I don’t like that there is content on the internet that is, to say the least, horrifying to my standards and morals. There are things for sale online that a sane person would never even think of – but there is also a lot of good an I believe that the internet can be and should be a tool for free speech and for free markets.

A lot of what I learn on a daily basis comes from things online – I always think that if I have a problem at my job or at home (even a plugged toilet), that someone else has had that same problem and perhaps has posted their solution on the internet.

Back to China and the freedom they lack because of their governments vain attempts to censor the content that comes to their people. They don’t have the freedom that I do, to write this. If a Chinese citizen wrote something like this, they would probably be thrown in a work camp somewhere because it is true and freedom is what all people, in their hearts want. You can only suppress over a billion people for so long before they realize that they have been kept in the dark. The same can be said for here as well on other topics.

I don’t agree with Mr. Schmidt’s politics at all – but he is absolutely correct about this. People will not stay stupid forever. And when there are a billion of them against you… eek.

“We believe in empowering people who care about freedom of expression,” he said. “The evidence today is that Chinese attacks are primarily industrial espionage…. It’s primarily trade secrets that they’re trying to steal, and then the human rights issues, that obviously they’re trying to violate people’s human rights. So those are the two things that we know about, but I’m sure that there will be others.”

He goes on and says – “I think that the countries that we’re talking about all had very active censorship regimes, and they failed to censor the Internet. They wired the phone systems, the television was controlled, the newspapers were controlled; it was very hard to find genuinely new dissident voices except on the Internet. So you can think of what happened there as a failure to fully censor, and so it’s obvious why we feel so strongly about openness and transparency.”